The U.S. Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, 6-3, in Trump v. Barbara. Constitutional scholars are calling it a landmark. My neighbor’s eight-year-old is calling it a personal betrayal.

He had a plan. For weeks, he assembled a defense to the broken planter, the missing Capri Suns drinks, and above all, the 8 p.m. bedtime, and the theory was airtight because he borrowed it from the dissenting justices of the United States Supreme Court.

It goes like this. The 14th Amendment makes you a citizen if you are born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The administration and the dissenters argued that the last phrase means more than merely living somewhere and having to follow its rules. It requires “primary allegiance,” the kind you establish only by putting down a permanent home, a “domicile.” Someone just passing by owes his allegiance elsewhere, and so people aren’t truly subject to the local authorities at all.

My neighbor’s child read that and recognized an opportunity. He pays rent. Well, his parents do. He spends his summers at a camp in Wyoming. His domicile, he would argue, is deeply unsettled. His primary allegiance is to the Utah Jazz. He is, at most, a temporary sojourner in his own home, owing it nothing more than “local and temporary allegiance,” and you cannot send a sojourner to bed. In lieu of a timeout, he requested immediate extradition to his grandmother’s house in St. George.

It’s a beautiful argument. It is also, based on the reasoning of the Supreme Court decision, worth precisely nothing. However, it’s worth saying why, because the same argument, dressed in a suit, picked up three votes at the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, reached back to Chief Justice John Marshall’s definition from 1812: jurisdiction is the full and complete power of a nation within its own territories. Marshall wrote that a visitor who turns up for “business or caprice” is entirely answerable to local law. The narrow exceptions are for foreign diplomats and invading armies — people the sovereign genuinely cannot reach. An eight-year-old standing in his own kitchen is not, by any measure, an invading army. He is the single most thoroughly governed person in the state of Utah. The proof that he is subject to his mother’s jurisdiction is that he is, at this moment, in a timeout.

I take a personal interest in all this because I once had the same idea he did. I’m a permanent resident as I have a green card, not a passport, so my allegiance really is a little complicated.

I regret to report it changes nothing. I pay Utah taxes. I answer to the Utah courts. Jurisdiction was never about who pledges allegiance to whom. It is about who can be governed—and for the child and for me, jurisdiction is complete.

Which is why this was not an abstract week in Utah. Our attorney general, Derek Brown, signed a brief urging the courts to let the order take effect over the objection of Gov. Spencer Cox, who called birthright citizenship constitutionally protected.

Nearly one in nine Utahns is foreign-born, and about 6% of U.S.-born children in the state live with an immigrant parent.

Strip the joke out, and the stakes are flatly real: had the dissenters won, hospitals and the Social Security Administration would have spent the foreseeable future sorting Utah newborns by their parents’ paperwork. Nationwide, an estimated 250,000 babies each year would have been required to document the citizenship they were born holding.

The plain rule survived. A child born in Logan or Orem is American the moment they arrive before anyone checks a single form. While my neighbor’s eight-year-old is back in bed by 8 p.m., I’m no longer a temporary sojourner, just a Utahn, fully and completely subject to his mom’s jurisdiction.

Given the alternative, I’ll take it.